The Wilted Covenant

A locket hangs—a frozen teardrop’s weight—
its face engraved with dates that hesitate
to speak of springtimes buried under frost.
She whispers to the roses, long since lost,
“We swore beneath the elder oak’s embrace,
to guard this plot from time’s unkindly face.
Yet roots now gnaw the relics of our pledge—
was every word a dagger to the edge?”
The wind, a mourner, hums through rusted reeds,
and stirs the dust of unacknowledged creeds.

Three decades past, the garden knew her name.
Young Seraphina, torch of gentle flame,
would dance where peonies blushed at her tread,
her laughter silver chains the sun had spread.
Here, by the sundial’s slanted breath, she vowed
with him whose voice could split the darkest cloud—
“Let winter claim the world, but never here.
This soil shall drink our love, not one cold tear.”
They planted jasmine where their palms had pressed,
and sealed their oath where lilies built their nest.

But wars, like locusts, grind their teeth unseen.
The callous world beyond those walls of green
sent missives stained with ink that reeked of brine—
a conscript’s script, a labyrinth of lines.
He left with dawn’s first bruise upon the sky,
his shadow grafted to her narrowing eye.
“Wait for the wisteria’s third bloom,” he swore.
She counted suns—eleven hundred four—
till autumn came, a judge without a face,
and tossed his ring into the void’s embrace.

The garden heard her wails transmute to rain,
saw blight seep through her veins like poisoned chain.
Yet still she pruned, she sowed, she cursed the weeds,
as if her sweat could resurrect the seeds
of promises that rotted underground.
Each bud she cradled, every tendril wound,
became a verse in her elegiac book—
the tulips, parchment; thorns, the quill she took
to scribble pleas into the soil’s black ear:
“Take my breath, but let his memory appear.”

Seasons writhed. The sundial’s numerals blurred,
its gnomon bent like hope’s abandoned word.
Her mirror now reflected not her face,
but vines that strangled light without a trace.
One midnight, as the frost began its creep,
she glimpsed a specter where the willows weep—
a figure clad in uniform of mould,
his eyes two pits where embers once had glowed.
“You’ve kept the oath,” he sighed, “yet I must speak:
the garden lives…because your heart grows weak.”

She clutched the air where his outline had frayed,
her fingers knitting frost instead of shade.
“If blight is price for petals forced to stay,
then let me be the debt the earth repay.”
At dawn, she brought the shears with trembling care,
and culled her treasures with a lover’s stare—
the peonies that mocked his vanished scent,
the lilacs that his absence had unpenned,
until the ground lay bare as vows undone,
save one white rose, kissed cold by winter’s sun.

Beneath that bloom, she laid her locket down,
its portrait worn to shades of sepia brown.
“Now take what’s left,” she told the ravenous land,
“but spare this last, frail flower where we stand.”
The soil shuddered, drank her final breath,
and in that gasp, reversed the dance of death—
up surged a grove of blossoms drenched in light,
each petal forged from her surrendered night.
But where she fell, no stone proclaims her loss:
just roots that clutch a locket shaped like moss.

And travelers who chance upon this glen
speak of strange scents that haunt like vanished men,
of roses white as lethe’s whispered stream,
and how the garden’s breath resembles steam
from tear-stained cheeks pressed hard against the air.
They leave in haste, yet cannot say quite where
the sorrow starts—the flowers or the fence—
but all agree: the beauty here is dense
and sharp, like love that starves itself to thrive,
and in its splendor, makes the soul contrive
to fathom sacrifices wrapped in green—
how vows outlive the hands that made them keen.
The sundial’s shadow, longer now, still writes
her name in silence on the face of nights.